By Eleanor Reader
Ovum is encouraging insurers to deploy predictive analytics as a way to improve their competitive position.
A new report from Ovum states that in order to be better prepared for future market challenges, insurers should focus on creative initiatives that analyse data from a number of sources, including social media, third parties and machine-to-machine communications.
“By concentrating predictive analytics on key areas of the business – namely business operations, marketing and customer relations – insurers will be able to determine which markets to enter or leave, shape target market initiatives and estimate potential losses for the book of business as each customer is added,” the company stated in a press release.
“Insurers are already well aware of the impending threats/challenges including tightening regulation, demanding customers, an ageing population and weakened economies,” said Barry Rabkin, principal analyst, Ovum.
“The critical differentiator for insurers will be minimising future risk thorough predictive analytics by tapping into the vast amounts of rich data.”
Rabkin added that a new role is emerging – the data scientist role – that will be just as important as the data miner role in the insurance industry.
According to Ovum, it is already seeing a growing number of insurance companies creating new departments of these types of quantitatively skilled professionals.
This role will take a deeper approach to research (i.e. collect more data and explore more hypotheses) and generate recommendations that are scalable down to individual lines of insurance business.
Ovum believes that data scientists and data miners will work closely together to discuss “what if” questions regarding their predictive analytics initiatives.
